MTEX Solutions: A Key Iberian Manufacturer, Sprouting New Industrial Printers

MTEX Solutions, the Portuguese manufacturer of digital printers for textile and label applications, recently held its debut summit for customers and prospects in Porto, Portugal’s beautiful port city. Sporting the tagline “Back, Better than Ever,” the summit drew participants from as far away as Russia and the U.S. These attendees came to learn about a key industrial inkjet printer vendor, one lately transformed and growing internationally, and its new products. Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends (InfoTrends) attended the event and offers here what it captured about the company and its newest hardware.

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Nintendo Labo Shows Potential for New Sustainable Corrugated Cardboard Applications

Consumer electronics specialist Nintendo has been enjoying positive growth. Its newest video game console, the Nintendo Switch, is proving quite popular among consumers who are seeking an innovative gaming experience at home and on the go. With its numbers back in the green, the Japanese video game manufacturer has returned to doing what it does best—taking creative risks. One of its most recent products, Nintendo Labo, exemplifies the company’s desire to push the envelope.

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Why North America is Embracing Digital Wide Format Printing

The digital revolution is impacting every industry, and this includes wide format printing. Advancements in digital wide format technology have created the potential for new offerings. This is important news for a wide variety of businesses, including marketing firms as well as sign, graphics, and visual communication companies. In our recent analysis, Embracing Digital Wide Format Printing, Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends explores how signage companies can leverage these innovations and highlights the benefits of making the switch.

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Digital Print, Expanding Horizons in Woodworking

The biannual International Woodworking Fair, which took place August 21-25 in Atlanta, GA, held its inaugural Digital Printing Symposium, which was created in partnership between IWF, the organizers of the show, Surface & Panel Magazine, and Keypoint intelligence. While this symposium is new, digital printing has actually been part of the woodworking industry for some time. That said, the need to short-run cost-effective decorative surfaces, as well as ongoing development in digital inkjet printing sector, is creating a perfect storm for the technology to meet woodworking’s market needs.

Inaugural IWF Digital Print Symposium

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The Ricoh Ecosystem: Interact 2018

Do you go to vendor open houses and networking events? If you are a customer of any of the big hardware vendors or many of the independent software vendors you are likely to receive a cheery invitation to one or more events each year that give you an opportunity to hear from the company executives and listen to technical presentations on current and future products. They usually bring in a few industry speakers and try to create an environment where everyone has an opportunity to network. These are valuable experiences for the vendors who host them, the customers who attend them, and the journalists and analysts to attend, as well.

Ricoh recently hosted their Interact 2018 meeting in Westminster, Colorado, just a short ride form their plant in Boulder. The event was full of interesting insights from Ricoh staff, customers, and industry speakers, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about Interact. For a company like Ricoh there are a lot of moving parts. Even inside of Commercial and Industrial Printing, led in the US by John Fulena, there are production cut sheet, production web, wide format, and a variety of industrial print devices worthy of your attention. Staging a conference where attendees can get a sense of Ricoh – One Ricoh – is difficult. How many sessions do you run concurrently? how do you give everyone podium time to talk about their innovations?

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Smart Package Manufacturing: HP One Package Workflow Suite Brings New Levels of Optimization

Corrugated product producers have traditionally thought in terms of square meters and board feet. The goal: keep corrugated products heading out the door. For corrugators that meant keeping the corrugator online and in production which was managed with a Manufacturing Execution System tied to standard business management software suites. Corrugated board manufacturers often use their business systems to manage their manufacturing requirements, augmented with process-specific tools. The advent of digital corrugated production options adds many more requirements to the production workflow, most of which are closer to traditional commercial printing than traditional converting. With experience born from implementations of both digital liner preprinting ahead of corrugation and digital corrugated board printing (“post printing”) comes the HP One Package workflow suite targeted toward users of all HP PageWide Industrial corrugated presses.

Source: HP

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Keypoint Intelligence Forecasts Continued Growth in Business Inkjet & A4 Color Laser Shipments through 2022 in North America and Western Europe

While the overall office equipment markets in NA and WE are mature, Keypoint Intelligence/InfoTrends expect continued growth in A4 Color Laser and Business Inkjet Segment 3 & 4 according to recently published SF Printer and MFP Hardware Forecasts for both regions. In addition, the shift from SF printers to multi-functional devices will continue. According to the forecast, in North America, SF Laser printers represented 46% of total shipments in 2017 and are expected to decline to 42% of devices compared with MF shipments which will grow from 52% to 58% by 2022.  While in Western Europe MF shipments will grow from 55% to 59% of total shipments during the same period.

In addition, total NA office color laser shipments are also expected to outperform monochrome devices during the same period growing from 33% of total shipments to 37% by 2022. While in Western Europe, office color laser is expected to grow from 39% of total shipments to 41% during the same period. While the overall market for both regions will remain relatively flat to a slight decline the shift from SF to MF devices and from monochrome to color will continue to impact the overall office equipment market. The biggest opportunity for growth is within the office color laser A4 segments (2-4) for both regions. The chart below provides a breakout by region and segment.

North America & Western Europe Office A4 Color Laser Forecast 2017-2022

Business Inkjet Segments Continue to Grow

In addition to the growth in A4 color laser, Keypoint Intelligence/InfoTrends forecast shows growth in Business Inkjet Segments 3 and 4 through the same period. Business Inkjet Segment 3 is expected to grow at 5.9% CAGR in North America and 2.8% CAGR in Western Europe.  The majority of unit growth will be in A4 MFPs in this business inkjet segment with new models that offer longer life consumables and feature-rich product offerings. This new breed of inkjet devices offers an attractive alternative to laser particularly within the SMB office environment with standard wireless connectivity, high yield consumables and in some cases, comparable cost per page to laser. Furthermore, Inkjet Segment 4 is expected to grow at 10.8% CAGR in North America and 3.7% CAGR by 2022 in Western Europe during the same period, driven by a wider acceptance of page-wide technology and new robust high-speed color inkjet devices entering this market segment.

North America and Western Europe Business Inkjet Segment 3 and 4 Shipment Forecast 2017-2022

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Velox IDS 250: A Spike In the Chart For ‘DTS’ Printing

Israeli technology developer Velox, Ltd. announced recently its first installation of a production-level direct to shape (DTS) printer at a major packaging manufacturer in Israel. The news marks the first commercial installation of Velox IDS 250 printer, a UV inkjet-based system that Velox says will print plastic and aluminum tubes at up to 250 containers per minute with seamless, photorealistic images, and offer other embellishments such as tactile effects. Most importantly, Velox says the new system’s capabilities and costs will allow it to replace analog decoration systems even for the printing runs of many thousands of cans or tubes.

Velox, based in Rosh Ha’Ayin, Israel, has placed this first IDS 250 at another Israeli company, Lageen Tubes, a packaging supplier to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals companies worldwide. Velox and Lageen note that the IDS 250 is now in operation printing full runs of tubes that will soon be on retail shelves globally.

Velox IDS 250 Digital Decorator

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HP T-Series for Corrugated: Up to 6 Colors & 1,000 FPM Speed Options

In the crush of news from last month’s FESPA in Berlin is one corrugated story that merits extra attention: HP’s PageWide Industrial division, which pioneered the high-speed CMYK pre-printing of corrugated liner media with HP PageWideT400S and 1100S in 2014, announced at the show the introduction of two new versions of the 110”/2.8m wide press, the HP PageWide T1170 and T1190. Each prints six colors (CMYK plus Orange and Violet), extending the color gamut to meet brand colors, and also feature HP ColorBoost technology. The presses feature HP A30 water-based inks do not use UV-reactive chemistry, so the products printed are food safe. The T1190 also offers a big increase in productivity to 1000 fpm/305 mpm, up from the 600 fpm/183 fpm of HP T1100S. Both the T1170 and T1190 presses are suitable for both coated and uncoated media, from 80 gsm to 350 gsm. They are available now, either as new installations or as on-site upgrades to the twelve T1100S installations that exist today worldwide.

HP PageWide T-Series

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Xeikon: Inkjet, EP Both Strong, Get Equal Focus

Xeikon, a big presence at Labelexpo and many other tradeshows, is also one of the rare vendors that in effect hosts its own tradeshows, namely the Xeikon “Cafés” that occur yearly in Belgium and the U.S. The latest Xeikon Café occurred last week near the company’s North American headquarters in Itasca, IL and hosted over 200 guess and 30 exhibiting partners. Xeikon, the main focus, showed all its printers at the company’s nearby demonstration center and hosted a big conference program, with presentations by Xeikon managers, customers, and industry analysts.

Quick Impressions:

• Xeikon, an electrophotographic (EP) pioneer, now is equally focused on inkjet
• Xeikon inkjet at first will be for labels, but soon it will be for finishing and, next, for corrugated
• Xeikon’s EP core had strong growth in the last twelve months, especially in label and packaging
• Flint, maker of analog print supplies and Xeikon’s owner, is a helpful and ambitious partner

Xeikon’s recent inkjet history is fairly well known. In early 2017 this EP printer vendor surprised the market by announcing its plan to offer its first production-level UV inkjet label printer, the PX3000 (“Panther”). Then in November 2017, Xeikon announced that it was taking over service and support duties from EFI for the EFI Jetrion installed base, over 200 UV inkjet label webs, mainly in North America and Europe. PX3000 is just now having its first placements, but, all things considered, 2017 and 2018 have been years when Xeikon, an EP stalwart, jump started an industrial inkjet printer business.

Xeikon Panther PX3000

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